dum vivimus servimus
by Dorminchu
Summary: A2 struggles to find her purpose in a world without machines or YoRHa. [Post-Ending E]


a/n: It's been a while since I played through Automata, and given the open-ending in Route E, I've extrapolated on certain details for the sake of this character study. I'm planning, if there's enough interest, to do a sequel about 2B and 9S as well.

* * *

Upon rebooting, the sky was clear and bright blue. A2 righted herself, unsteady but aware of the stillness preceding a possible ambush by machine lifeforms; she had no weapons, and would be wise to obtain a substitute while she could.

Pod 042 had not acknowledged her return to consciousness, nor the lack of machine activity. _That's weird. Usually it won't shut up._

With a quick glance over the local area, she found she was back in the ruins of the city. The tower that reached towards the horizon was still, and her sensory receptors, though out-of-date, still registered a strange heaviness in the air; similar to the faux-peace that came before a thunderstorm, but lacking any humidity.

_All right, might as well try something_… "Pod Zero-Four-Two, this is YoRHa Unit A-2. Come in." The continuing silence irked her. _Something's wrong. Where's the other YoRHa unit? _"Pod Zero-Four-Two, respond."

She'd have to be preemptive, as she had no way to determine the scanner's location on her own, let alone if he was still operational. _Maybe he sabotaged my Pod while I was out. Either way, he's just as much a problem as those damn machines. _Realistically, working alone would be much faster than waiting around for orders from a defunct organization.

* * *

It didn't take long to find him, curled up beside his executioner and their Pods. They might be dead, or merely inert until a period of reactivation. A2 didn't care to find out either way; she concerned herself with the little white box at 2E's feet. She didn't call out to it this time. If it wasn't beyond repair, it could be reprogrammed easily, passing the torch back to its rightful owner—no longer her concern.

Her most important goal now was to find a suitable weapon, and neither YoRHa unit was armed. Without rage to sate her, she left the pair to dream until waking and instead made her way towards the city, massive skyscrapers crumbling into each other, slowly being overtaken by organic lifeforms, automobiles abandoned and gutted, whether by machines or some other lifeforms she did not care.

There were countless corpses, android and machine alike, but to A2 they were all the same after so many repeating cycles. The organic lifeforms did not pursue her, and she let them be—they were not her quarry. She obtained a spear and a simple, cruel-looking blade from one of the more heavily armored YoRHa—the latest weapons, such as 2E's Virtuous Treaty, were usually more durable and efficient—and continued onward.

Arriving at overlooking some awesome crater, A2 paused. No sign of any machine lifeforms yet. Self-termination was a more logical conclusion than not, but the presence of the will—a selfish design flaw—stayed her own hand, even now. There must be more of them festering, just out of sight, and she would eliminate them all in the coming days. Then she could rest.

* * *

A day passed, yet she had found no machine lifeforms. But it was only a day—she had to keep trying.

Then the second day passed, and the third. She'd grown accustomed, however grudgingly, to the incessant input from Pod 042. Such an absence was nothing to be mourned—most of the time, the Pod had just grated on her nerves—but the silence invited a new kind of unease, a settling lack of purpose that she could not outrun.

There would be no peaceful entropy for her, in this world or whatever state of living succeeded permanent deactivation, until her mission was complete. But after a week had come and gone, and she had scoured the desert and the abandoned complex set into the cliffs, A2 could not easily ignore the emptiness around her. The desert air and occasional, vicious sandstorms weren't kind to her body, but she'd stopped caring about that a long time ago, regardless.

* * *

On the second week, she could conclude there were no machine lifeforms inhabiting the desert. She would have to look elsewhere. There was the old village of machines, but A2 held off for the moment; no point wasting time with empty homes. The factory seemed an obvious, if somewhat ironic, choice.

In spite of herself, or perhaps with nothing better to do while traversing the environment—blistering powder-sand gave way to cement and upturned roots, the scent of flora and soil deeper towards the war-torn crater at the heart of the city—her thoughts turned back to the remaining YoRHa units—2E, 9S. She hadn't run into either of them yet. A2 had no desire to do so; especially not 9S. The scanner would undoubtedly hate her, without fault. She had dispatched his only partner before, and despite his own purpose as a sacrificial lamb, he would, with time, come to forgive the execution unit before he forgave her murderer.

So to A2 he became the same as any other target; the nameless combat android with her red eyes and desperate, anguished smile before the elevator closed behind her; Unit 2E's eyes glazing over as she was run through with her own weapon, a merciful death compared to the alternatives; Pascal, surrounded by his ilk, incapable of understanding they would never progress beyond the sum of their parts as he had. In the end, like Pascal, the scanner would be his own enemy, lose himself again to the logic virus, or some other fatal error of judgement, and he was not worth the execution.

* * *

The factory was undisturbed upon her arrival, the only sound coming from her heavy footfalls on steel. Inactive stubbies lay in the mechanical captivity of their construction, but they were still targets, and she didn't need a stupid Pod to eliminate them. Vaulting over the railing, she used the man-made structure to her advantage—reaching the compartments took ten seconds, and, entering B-mode, she tore them apart, jumping from one compartment to the next without delay.

At least she could pretend she was doing something useful.

For a minute or so, her strength flourished. She needed more time, could feel the familiar drain, the weight in her limbs, and kept going despite the yawning abyss below and the discordant screeching of metal on metal, every crash of her body into the next stubbie's cage.

_Who gives a shit? __They're already dead. And sooner or later, I'll be… _she latched onto the next machine, the desire to ruin conflicting vertigo—_if you want to kill them all, you need to survive_.

Landing carelessly upon the bridge, A2 quickly collapsed under duress, gasping for air she didn't need—another design flaw—and, bracing her weight upon the blade, dragged herself upright, staggering into the light.

* * *

—came back online without prior knowledge of crashing. The gap in her recent memory subsisted, yet she still had her weapons. Weak enough to sit up, she forced herself to stand as soon as it was possible and stumbled towards the pier.

With a lack of spare parts to repair damages sustained thanks to the elements, there could be no more mistakes—and no point in going to the Resistance Camp, for the same redundancy in going to Pascal's shitty village, or seeking out her successors and shamefully asking for repentance.

* * *

There were no machines left in the abandoned structures around the city, or the forest, which slept quietly in absence of interlopers. A2 found the castle, cleared her way through many an empty hall littered with corpses younger than their resting place. She hadn't killed all of them, regrettably. 2E and 9S had come through here after her a long time ago. A2 didn't really know how long it had been, but it felt as though a good deal of time had passed.

She was still the inferior, volatile combat model, an ancient contrast to the latest generation's modern capabilities and diligently programmed sense of duty, (prone to overheating under too much physical duress, with a berserk mode that only exemplified these flaws) yet despite the generational gap, both YoRHa units possessed the very same face with the exact mole, to appeal a less robotic audience that no longer existed. They were not encumbered by their sprawling intellect and capacity to solve problems; they had one purpose and fulfilled it excellently, until now.

And she was still functional. So she had to keep looking.

In time she came to the deeper part of the castle and found a library several stories tall: with nothing else to do, and with a strange sense of nostalgia, she began reading—tried to, before the itching feeling returned and she felt the books were better used as target practice—it wasn't as if any human would want to read them, anyway—and that was fun for a few minutes, the echo of some purpose regained, but then her mood soured and she was scaling floors until she came to a door that she hadn't taken notice of before, old and titanic as the library itself.

Beyond the chapel within, there was only a gravestone and the sunshine creeping in. It might have been peaceful, in another life or time without the endless cycle of proxy wars. Suddenly A2 didn't want to linger here anymore. This place was getting to her.

* * *

Pascal's village remained untouched, except for the signs of mechanical warfare. It was an unsatisfying answer to a question she'd been hoping to avoid, but there was no sense in prolonging the lie, was there?

The weather was overcast and a chill gripped her, despite a lack of true human perception the synthetic flesh still yielded bumps. The ineptitude of their human designers never failed to aggravate her; it was something Anemone had liked talking about while alive. Better to find common ground in mirth, even if temporary, than the more popular alternative.

It was getting difficult to maintain a prolonged glide while sprinting; her cloaking system must be in need of maintenance. Of course, the stupid Pod would have told her about that, but she had to make do with her own reckless conscience. Whatever.

But there was one last place she could check, on the way to the she stopped and looked out over the bridge.

It took her a moment to recall: _this is where I terminated 2B_.

2E, not 2B, and 9S. Was she losing touch? They'd come to rely on each other, but without orders to follow, the pair would soon become helpless and irrational in the wake of futility. Perhaps 2E would come to her senses and look for her, but there was no way of knowing without the passage of time. It felt like a joke. There were no other alternatives, besides the obvious, and without absolute certainty A2 had no recourse but to wait.

With an easy stroke she severed the rope suspending the old bridge and watched it fall—the only new sound or movement for several days—and quietly entered the abandoned mall, alerting a flock of small, unremarkable birds; native inhabitants. She did not feel alone, or happy; null was the better word.

_2E will know. The Pods will sense my black box signal. They'll come back for me, and then we'll see what happens next. Just like before._


End file.
